Disease and Emergency Care
Before I get into this section I wanted to say a disclaimer. Firstly, I am not a veterinarian. I have no formal training in exotic animal care and I am not a doctor. Secondly, even if I was any of those things, invertebrate medicine is a critically under researched field. There are few if any papers written by veterinarians on the subject, and the information we do have is spotty at best and purely speculation at worst. I will try to do my absolute due diligence and will be researching this section by reading every paper and book that touches on the subject I can, and comparing the recommended treatments side by side. I will also be up front about treatments I have or have not tried, and where my recommendations are coming from with links to their primary sources for you to look at on your own. That being said,
Any advice or information given in this next section is taken at your own risk.
Scorpion Medicine and Good Practices
I wanted to start talking about good practices and common pitfalls I see when discussing scorpion medicine. Most care books only give a cursory look over different ailments and injuries that can affect your scorpion, so emergency advice is most commonly sought out on forums or in chat groups. This often leads to a well worn rundown of trying to fish answers and details out of the person asking for advice, so first and foremost I want to talk about how to complete a "Scorpion Intake form".
When trying to determine what is going on with your scorpion, detailed records and information are your best friend. Having a set template is also invaluable when asking other people for help, typically when trying to offer advice people are going to need to know basic conditions such as temperature, tank set up, and body weight anyway, and it will save a lot of time if you already have this information prepared. Furthermore, even if an explanation can't be found, it gives a solid and objective record that can be used to compare to similar cases later. This can help you identify trends, or determine which changes you've made work or don't work. This also helps the community as a whole, and allows more cases to be considered when discussing uncommon conditions and possible treatments.
Age (approximate age and instar)
Time in your Possession (did you just get the scorpion or has it been in your care for years? can also include origin if you know it was wild caught or captive bred)
Last 3 meals eaten (only meals the scorpion accepted, type of food, source of food, and dates)
Water Given in the Last Month (such as sprayed weekly, water bowl every 2 weeks, soaked substrate yesterday, ect)
Scorpion body condition (pictures help, describe weight and damage location and extent if concerned about mycosis or a rupture)
Scorpion disposition (reacts to stimuli or not, note weird behavior or movement, twitching, difficulty moving, ect)
Changes to Routine or Environment in the last week (things such as heat wave, cleaned the house so sprayed cleaners, went on vacation and didn't water them as normal, new decor item, ect)
Attempted treatments (For things you've already tried or changed if the problem is ongoing)
Keeping good records will help you fill out this form more accurately, but your best approximation can still be useful. Aside from giving precise information to help you get advice on a scorpion emergency, this form also helps more accurately identify causes. One of the biggest issues I see when giving advice or help is the bias we have towards finding a plausible solution. As stated before, scorpion (and invertebrates as a whole) health and medicine is very poorly understood. Understandably people want answers, but all too often someone suggests a plausible explanation and that explanation becomes canon even without direct evidence. Diagnosing health issues in scorpions is not something that can be reliably done by anyone without access to the scorpion, and is very unlikely to be able to be done without laboratory equipment and a biopsy or autopsy.
We can use this intake form to help identify trends, or to help build up a body of evidence across multiple cases, but in most instances you are not going to have a solid explanation or diagnosis of the problem. Furthermore, invertebrates do not readily show sickness, in most cases scorpions are found dead with little to no indication of illness before hand, and a number of possible reasons why this could have happened. The best you can hope for is to fill out the intake form anyway and use it for future reference.
Principles of Diagnostics
I want to also take a moment to talk about the limits of diagnosing a disease in inverts. Invertebrate medicine is not well understood, even in veterinary circles, and though there are some organizations looking to establish a formal set of best practices when it comes to treating inverts this is still in progress. As such, there is also not a great body of work on how to diagnose illnesses in inverts. The hobby typically uses anecdotal evidence to establish a set of best practices, but there is no formal way to confirm or categorize these. This can lead to "superstitions", or care practices that are based on cherry picked anecdotal evidence and widely applied to every case. I will go over these later. For now, I want to just caution people on diagnosing an illness, especially if you plan on reporting the case to other people or give recommendations based on the case.
For example, I have a brood of Vaejovis carolinianus. I had quite a lot to start out with, and they all generally molted to 3i without issue. After a while though, I started experiencing steady losses. I started checking them more frequently because I assumed they were drying out, so I was checking them 2-3 times a week and finding one dead almost every time I checked them, leading to a loss of about 2-3 a week. There didn't seem to be any reason to it, and other individuals were molting into 4i without a problem, and clearly keeping the enclosures more moist didn't seem to be changing the outcome. I rearranged some enclosures, which included putting the Vaejovis carolinianus higher up on the shelf so they were a bit closer to the heat lamp, and decided to just check on them once a week. After doing this, I stopped experiencing any losses. It's been months without me losing another individual and they're all at 4i or 5i now. So what caused the change?
Now as a hobbyist reporting this to other people in the hobby, there might be a few theories thrown around. Maybe excess moisture wasn't the problem, and they actually wanted it a bit drier so watering only once a week fixed the issue. Maybe the slight increase in warmth they got from being moved to a higher shelf did it. Maybe the first couple deaths were flukes and the rest were caused from stress because I was checking the enclosures more frequently. Or, maybe the molt from 3i to 4i is particularly difficult and regardless of anything I would've experienced losses. A hobbyist giving you a recommendation can take any of these factors and make a case for it, I really advocate for warmer temps for scorpions so I could take parts of this story and say that increasing their heat fixed the problem, but I did not (and would not have) performed a controlled experiment to prove this. I think it would be unethical for me to separate the scorpions into groups and tried different treatments in each group, because that would be necessarily condemning some groups to continued die off. Very few people are willing or able to perform controlled experiments like that, which of course means that any conclusion I could draw based on my observations would be just based on my own experience and beliefs.
This is how most hobby medicine and best practices get developed, which isn't a bad thing. The opportunity for controlled experiments is extremely limited, and most science happening on a professional level is not focused on improving care standards. This does mean that we as hobbyists have to be extremely careful about diagnosing illness and recommending treatment and best practices though. If your diagnoses is wrong, or your treatment appeared to fix the problem but you don't take other factors into account, you can be contributing to misinformation and the culture of care via superstition.
DKS in tarantula's is a primer example of this, dyskinetic syndrome is not well understood, there are no proven causes of DKS and few suggested cures. DKS has also so far only been described officially in spiders, and overwhelmingly described in tarantulas. It is also not a specific disease but rather a set of symptoms that include twitchiness, inability for the tarantula to right itself, and weakness that eventually leads to death. There is no diagnostic test for DKS, and the symptoms that describe DKS can also apply to many other illnesses. Dehydration is often described as DKS because twitchiness and weakness are common symptoms in a chronically dehydrated spider. Dehydration is treatable through a rapid application of fluids. Too many keepers see twichiness in a spider and immediately assume DKS and move straight to euthanasia. People also diagnose their spiders with DKS and then notice an improvement in symptoms upon offering water, and then suggest giving fluids as a cure for all DKS cases. I have even seen DKS suggested for other arachnids or even insects, despite it never being formally described or reported in any of these groups, based off the symptom of "twichiness" and nothing more. Imagine if instead we had something called "Lethargy Syndrome", which described lethargy in arachnids as well as general sluggishness, refusal of food or water, and wasting away. Imagine if people jumped to Lethargy Syndrome as an explanation whenever any of these symptoms showed up, and no further effort was taken to determine the cause of the lethargy or treat it. People would go around saying their scorpion died of "Lethargy Syndrome" and that they didn't do anything to try to treat it because everyone "knows it's incurable". Over applying DKS as a diagnosis does real damage to the community, and leads to bad data and misinformation, and can lead to arachnids not being treated when they could be treated or being euthanized unnecessarily. Being careful and specific with how you diagnose illnesses and suggest treatments is paramount to ensuring better quality care down the line.
The actual first aid section of this is taking longer to research than I thought, so for now I'm just going to post this intro and my philosophy of care.
